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The mysterious inner workings of a female duck

zuzu

Belle Waring has the tale of a fascinating new discovery about the reasons that certain male ducks have such extravagant penises.

Let’s just say that it involves certain blind spots of male researchers.

Incidentally, is anyone else uncomfortable with the term “forced mating?” Sounds like ducks get raped on a fairly regular basis, even though theoretically the females choose their mates.

34 thoughts on The mysterious inner workings of a female duck

  1. As a biologist, especially as an entomologist, the term “forced mating” does not make me uncomfortable. It’s not exactly a news flash that forced mating occurs in the animal world. Insects have all sorts of horribly violent, fatal sex. And entomologists have known for years and years that females have all sorts of mechanisms for choosing which sperm she’ll keep and which sperm she won’t – and males in turn have evolved things like scrub brush penises and traumatic insemination. You know, our friend the Red Queen. Maybe the vertebrate people are just behind the curve.

  2. I would get the willies if someone used “forced mating” to refer to humans (and this is why it squicks me the hell out when furries call their SOs “mates”) but for animals? Well… yeah. We could call it rape, I guess, but I feel like that’s slightly inexact given the relative sentience/sapience of animals and the issues of consent for humans. Is human intercourse described as mating in scientific texts? This really isn’t my field, so – honest question.

    Also, I have my period right now, and the thought of trying to get a tampon in a spiral vagina makes me want to fall over. But you’re absolutely right on the interesting implications of the fact that it took a scientist who’s a woman to have the Novel and Revolutionary Idea of actually looking at the receiving end of the mating process. Sad, but not exactly surprising.

  3. Consider this: it’s only relatively recently that anyone’s bothered to study the clitoris in any sort of detail.

  4. There were studies of ducks that DID describe it that way, and then drew various analogies to human behavior that suggested a “naturalness” to rape — something to which feminist scientists (e.g. Anne Fausto-Sterling) strenuously objected.

  5. To be fair, I get the idea that there weren’t a lot of PhD theses being written about how ducks fuck.

  6. Alex, my undergrad had a whole course on Reproduction in Farm Animals. We called it Chicken Sex. It was an honors course. How animals reproduce is a HUGE topic in agriculture.

    Also, the article I originally read on this used the word rape. I was really surprised, considering all the articles that said that a man “had sex with” a 9 year old girl.

  7. You think regular duck rape is unsettling? Have you heard of the duck necrophiliac?

    Nymphalidae, thank you for your comment. Yes, gals, it’s a bona fide mating strategy, though one we find distasteful. There’s a lot about animal behavior that will squick you: male chimps killing all infants when they take control of a group, cuckoos getting other bird species to rear their eggs (and trashing the foster parents’ nests when they refuse), male birds trying to forcibly remove another male’s semen from the cloaca of a female bird, and of course, dolphin rape.

    But really, I hope nobody’s trying to place a human ethical system on another species, particularly one that is not sentient (to our knowledge). Similarly, please don’t villify research into such subjects. It’s science! They’re interesting scientific questions, and if such appalling or fascinating topics get people into science, I’m not about to complain. (Now, if someone gets interested in animal behavior because they want to justify rape in humans, then I might have to get out the Bat of Science.)

  8. To be fair, I get the idea that there weren’t a lot of PhD theses being written about how ducks fuck.

    Which is too bad, because boy would that be fun to talk about at cocktail parties and family occasions. My answer to the “what is your dissertation about, dear?” question is some version of “blah, blah, blah, changing conceptions of citizenship, blah, blah, blah”. It would be much more fun to say “I work on the mechanics of duck sex.”

  9. To be fair, I get the idea that there weren’t a lot of PhD theses being written about how ducks fuck.

    Not live ones…

  10. Over at Pharyngula, there’s a long thread about this, most of which concerns whether one should use the term ‘rape’ or ‘forced copulation’ when speaking of non-human animals. It gets rather heated…

  11. Using ‘rape’ for ducks trivializes human rape. You’d be essentially drawing an analogy between the two — and to say that a human rapist has the same intention as a duck is ignoring all the crap that really is in the head of the former.

  12. Well, I called what one of my male cats did to one of my female cats rape. There were wounds on her neck and everything from where he’d forced her down and she was obviously traumatized. I got him neutred soon afterwards because of it.

    On the other,hand – My ex’s male cat and the same female cat seemed to be more “mutual” and being the sweetheart that he was, certainly seemed more considerate towards her. Oh, and he never injured her, not once.

  13. Oh my god!! I’ve read stuff about enormous duck corkscrew-penises before, but I just assumed that researchers had figured out what the correlated developments were in female ducks, but that the journalists and authors reporting about this were displaying a phallo-centric interest in the outrageous and more readily visible male duck equipment. It’s kind of mind-boggling that nobody even bothered to look, but maybe less so if, as mentioned above, you consider that a lot of the preliminary investigation was done by 19th century naturalists, and back then nobody even bothered to figure out a lot of things about human anatomy that might give boy scientists the cooties. Did you know that the clitoris is actually made up of 75% nerve endings and 25% highly transmissible cooties?

    That thread on Pharyngula is very interesting and I think it might have actually changed my mind about whether you should use “rape” vs. “forced copulation” for animals. I was previously thinking that calling animal behavior “rape” is trivializing a real human crime that has so much to do with power and powerlessness and when violence is permitted and to whom, etc. But now I’m kind of thinking that there might be powerful reasons to say that yes, all forced intercourse is rape, regardless of species. There are reasons male animals rape female animals, and there are even better reasons why humans should absolutely not be raping each other, because we have a great capacity to think about these things and make choices. I guess a lot of it has to do with whether you think animals are a great example for humans to follow of “natural, normal behavior”, or whether you think humans should rise above the level of instinct, or both/neither.

    Also, that thread in turn linked to this thread about infanticide instincts in primates, including humans which was super-interesting, and I have to say, not all that surprising. I am putting that book (“Mother Nature”) on my reading list since it seems like it could be really important for reproductive rights and discussions of parenting in general.

  14. Since animals aren’t ever capable of giving informed consent to sex, wouldn’t all non-human animal mating be rape? I’m far more comfortable with the terms “forced mating” and “voluntary mating”. Save the term rape for animals who can consent.

  16. Oh, the absurdity of it all.

    That it takes 250 years of zoology to figure out that females actually have a biological say in the world.

    That a woman is the one to actually challenge assumptions.

    That…
    never mind.

    Long Duck Dong.

    teehee.

  18. I think ‘forced copulation’ is usually a more descriptive term of the practice in non-human animals than ‘rape’. ‘Forced copulation’ is a detached, clinical description of a reproductive strategy in certain animal species. But I think only the most far gone evo-psych dope fiend would claim that rape in humans is mostly about a reproductive strategy. There are examples in cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’/genocide of men raping women in part for demographic reasons (but mostly because of power struggles). But I think most of us would agree that in humans, ‘rape’ as a word rarely refers to someone who wants to father a child without the consent of the woman. Sexual thrill, domination, etc… yes, but rarely reproduction.

    The word ‘forced copulation’ WOULD squick me when describing humans precisely because it would be an assumption that rape is a reproductive strategy in human beings rather than a tool to subjugate women.

  19. iain Over at Pharyngula, there’s a long thread about this, most of which concerns whether one should use the term ‘rape’ or ‘forced copulation’ when speaking of non-human animals. It gets rather heated…

    Yeah, that was an interesting thread, except for Cal.
    It only takes one asshole to ruin an otherwise intelligent conversation.

    I generally shy away from using rape to describe sex-acts in most animals for the same reasons why I wouldn’t call a wolf killing a rabbit “murder.”

  20. For lots more, modern info on where male scientific bias has screwed up evolutionary theory, I highly recommend Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow. She details lots of this sort of thing, but also gives an overarching new direction for evolutionary biology which encompasses methodology for avoiding such bias in the future, including not only sexist bias, but also heteronormative and bivalent gender bias..

  21. Yeah, I lived in Madison, WI for a while, lots of ducks, lots of duck ‘forced copulation’ . It’s very disturbing.

    I referred to it as rape when I saw it, as in, what the f*** are those ducks doing? Oh my god, they’re raping her! (It’s almost always multiple male ducks forcing themselves on one female.)

    Rape is not a scientifically appropriate term for it, but it worked with the initial, visceral reaction I had the first time I saw it.

  22. Somewhat off-topic, but I wanted to point our your word choice:

    “Sounds like ducks get raped on a fairly regular basis”

    instead of

    “Sounds like ducks rape on a fairly regular basis.”

  23. I almost always call it duck-rape (NOT a play on duck-tape) just because it’s SO violent. Cat sex can be–our local tomcat had a willing mate, but he did fool around on her a bit, and it was never pleasant–but it never felt as painful to watch as duck sex.

    I get a weird feeling that evolution is trying very hard to screw ducks over–no pun intended.

  28. I think some of the posters are trying a little too hard to find gender issues. The more likely reason is that ducks are a very minor agricultural species. In contrast, the female reproductive tracts of cattle, sheep and pigs are extremely well characterized. Just as much, if not more so than male reproductive tracts in those species.

  29. Well, Mike, except that duck penises have been widely studied, but somehow nobody thought to dissect a female to see if there was any kind of correspondence.

  30. There is definitely a history of male bias in biology hurting the science. For instance, it used to be that scientists thought that the male chimpanzee who won the dominance showdown was the only male who got to mate. Then someone sat down and really watched the chimps closely, and realized that a significant percentage of the offspring were the result of non-dominant male chimps heading off into the bushes with female chimps. Basically, female chimps were carrying on relationships quite freely under the ‘alpha’ nose.

    Oddly, the person who sat down and watched the chimps closely was Jane Goodall, the first woman to study the chimps. But I suppose that is just a coincidence?

  31. I studied orangutans this semester, and “forced copulation” was a major topic of discussion.

    I think I discovered I’m too much of a softie to really study apes. The whole first half of the lecture would be all about orang rape and chimps murder and warfare and whatnot, and then the second half of the lecture would be about deforestation and habitat loss and the bushmeat trade. I left that class depressed every time.

  32. I referred to it as rape when I saw it, as in, what the f*** are those ducks doing? Oh my god, they’re raping her! (It’s almost always multiple male ducks forcing themselves on one female.)

    I remember a few years ago some friends and I were in a park having a picnic when one of the guys points and asks ‘WTF?’ we all look around and see this huge group of ducks converging and trying to get on top of one other duck. Of course our first thought was ‘Zomg it’s a duck gang rape?!’ being a bit grossed out someone got up and just ran into the group causing them to run/flutter off.

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